User friendly showdown: Ubuntu 10.04 versus Windows 7

So recently I have written a lot about how user-friendly Linux has become. Naturally the nay-sayers have spoken loudly and insisted that Linux is far, far behind Windows in the user-friendliness category. So, I decided I wanted to figure out a way to test this argument to see which operating system was, in fact, more user friendly.

The idea of this test, in theory, was quite difficult. In practice…quite simple. The challenge was to come up with a way to illustrate a task, side by side, to see how the two operating systems compare. The problem is - fundamentally both are so disparate. But…eventually an idea bubbled up to the top.

Both operating systems can use a similar browser: Firefox. And both browsers very often rely on the Flash plugin. As both Firefox and the Flash Plugin are created (for both operating systems) by the same companies…it seemed the perfect solution to testing user-friendliness between Windows and Linux.

To further simplify the process I chose the most recent versions of the operating systems: Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04. The test will be installing the Flash plugin in two different ways: Using the browser and manually. Once complete with both processes (on both OSes) we can compare the results.

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